Labor Stand: Face of Precarious Migrant Construction Workers in India
Publication: Journal of Construction Engineering and Management
Volume 146, Issue 6
Abstract
The construction sector of India is the best representation of the informal workforce, which employs 36.12 million workers. These laborers flock together in a particular place on early morning every day in order to find a wage provider for them. It is a sale of labor for the day, where workers stand and make themselves available for a day to be hired by contractors or individual house owners. These places are known as labor stands, a stop for finding daily laborers for construction work, which is the distinctive addition of this research to the scant literature. This paper tries to explore the labor process among these unique informal construction workers’ labor assemblies consisting of 15,000 laborers per day and explore their employment conditions and labor relations. The paper also aims to examine the role of various actors of industrial relations such as trade unions and the government in regulating this employment relationship. The paper is based on a field study encompassing the transcribed records of observation, field interaction with 84 migrant construction workers, and 118 still photographs. The data were analyzed by using qualitative analysis software and adopting open thematic coding and later by developing categories and hierarchy and doing comparative analysis. The findings reveal that these laborers experience precariousness and are challenged by nonavailability of regular work, shortages of food, burden of large family size, and social evils of living in a slum, and also face being harassed by goons as well as contractors with minimal support from trade unions and government. Employers are apathetic toward their legal obligations. With labor stands being a primary source of labor supply to the construction sector, the findings of this paper will help in enriching labor relations and policy measures for its regulation.
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Data Availability Statement
Data generated or analyzed during the study are available from the corresponding author by request. Information about the Journal’s data-sharing policy can be found here: http://ascelibrary.org/doi/10.1061/(ASCE)CO.1943-7862.0001263.
Acknowledgments
The author is grateful to Professor Jatin Pandey, Assistant Professor, Indian Institute of Management, Indore, for his comments on an earlier draft of the paper. The author is also thankful to all the three anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions, which helped in improving the research paper.
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Journal of Construction Engineering and Management
Volume 146 • Issue 6 • June 2020
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©2020 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Jan 4, 2019
Accepted: Jul 8, 2019
Published online: Mar 18, 2020
Published in print: Jun 1, 2020
Discussion open until: Aug 18, 2020
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